loading . . . Sharpening the Saw with Emacs I’m using Emacs for some time now. As is custom, I move more and more of my computing, writing, and scripting into Emacs – becaue I learned to love the writing experience and through customization made it feel like it’s my own.
Now that Emacs is a comfy place, I tend to just hang out there from time to time and tinker with things.
In a woodworking workshop, this would be the time for rearranging, cleaning, and sharpening tools; time to organize the workshop, reflect on things I’ve crafted in the past, and how to improve the workshop; time to ponder how to approach the next project, and clean up after finished ones.
Stephen Covey, in his “7 Habits”, made the woodworking metaphor of “Sharpening the Saw” a prominent insight: You need to perform in your job, be productive, and do excellent work, but for that you also need time to work on your tools, not just with them. A dull saw won’t cut well.
Some of my interpretations of that metaphor:
* It cannot all be just about the performance. You also need downtime.
* If you only run as fast as you can, you’ll lose track of where you need to go.
* In meta-work, there’s potential for meditative practice, reflection, and joy.
* It’s a good sign that you want to improve the way you work, and not just “do the job” and then forget about it.
I’m blessed with a “day job” that I enjoy doing, and which is infinitely malleable, because all I do happens in front of a computer. That’s a work environment that you can tweak to whatever desires and circumstances. Here, Emacs does an incredible job: it offers a weird stock-standard experience, but helps you manifest a truly personalized computing environment _on any machine._ Windows, Linux, Mac – Android tablets, toasters, smart TV’s, you can get it to run anywhere and everywhere, take it with you when you change jobs, hobbies, or your phone. It stays with you as the rest of technology changes and moves in and out of fashion.
Spending time tinkering with Emacs and personalizing the computing environment is time spent well. It is time I can invest in my computing future.
I wouldn’t have imagined that switching my primary text editor all those years ago would result in a newfound sense of computing freedom. Freedom from proprietary shackles, yes; but also freedom to do things I want to do in a way I want to do them. To write in a particular way; to work with code and text and images and files and servers in a particular way.
Maintaining my Emacs configuration and setup equals maintaining my computer.
On lazy evenings (which I don’t have a lot of with a daughter and all), I can invest half an hour on something that got on my nerves during the day so that my future self will be better off. Maybe even more efficient, more productive, but that’s not always the point. Sometimes it’s just about removing dust so that it looks neater and feels nicer to use.
Oten, this means I’ll tinker with Emacs Lisp. For example, I recently wrote a short function to convert selected files in Dired to `.webp` for a better and easy general-purpose compression of images for all my web projects. Makes working with many files I touch every day feel less clunky. I’m a slightly happier person now.
Often, it also means I’m tinkering on _content_ I work on within Emacs. Clean up my `org-mode` files so that the next day won’t look and feel as cluttered. (I’m a terrible hoarder. And by default, my info management will degrade with clutter and noise, and I just get used to living in a pile of digital junk.)
Sometimes, it can be both coding and organizing – to tweak a bit of code that helps me filter or file away content in a nicer way. To find outdated tasks and delete them.
It’s both carthatic to know that I improved my overall computing situation, and it’s a source of joy to do it in this particular way. There’s joy in the process and outcome both. I did find that sharpening my chisels and blades has a similar effect – only with Emacs, because I like computer stuff even more, the tool maintenance is so much more fun.
This is my “Maintenance” October Emacs Carnival entry, hosted by Andy Drop.
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